The Seven Enclosures

The Seven Enclosures is a short treatise of spiritual direction written by Jan van Ruusbroec, prior of the Augustinian canons at Groenendaal in the Sonian Forest outside Brussels, for Margriet van Meerbeke, cantor of the Poor Clares in Brussels. Ruusbroec had spent twenty-five years as a chaplain at St. Gudula before withdrawing to Groenendaal in 1343, and he wrote in Dutch rather than Latin, for readers who lived the life he was describing rather than for the schools. Margriet had a vocation with fixed walls, a fixed horarium, and a demanding liturgical office to sing daily. Ruusbroec took that ordinary enclosed life exactly as it stood and used it as the figure for everything he had to say about union with God.

The treatise moves inward through a sequence of enclosures. It begins with the literal one — the cloister, the cell, restraint in food, drink, sleep, and speech — and treats these not as preliminaries to be transcended but as the outermost of a series of concentric shuttings-in, each of which is real. From the body it moves to the outer senses, then to the heart and its images and attachments, then to the ordering of intention and desire, and finally to the bare ground of the soul, where God encloses himself with the soul and the created intermediaries fall away. The interior enclosures are not metaphors for the exterior ones; the exterior ones are apprenticeship in the interior. Along the way Ruusbroec gives Margriet direct counsel proper to her office: how to sing the hours attentively, for God's praise rather than for the pleasure of the sound, and how to prepare for communion. And he insists, as he does everywhere, that the innermost rest does not cancel activity. The person who has been genuinely enclosed with God goes out again in love and works, in what Ruusbroec calls the common life — a standing rebuke to those who mistake natural stillness or spiritual self-satisfaction for union.

The work has lasted because it is Ruusbroec at his most compact and most practical. His larger treatises, above all The Spiritual Espousals, develop the same architecture at far greater length; here the whole structure is visible in an afternoon's reading, tied at every point to concrete obedience. Gerard Groote and the Devotio Moderna drew on him, and through them he shaped Northern European devotion for two centuries.

Who should read this: anyone living under a rule, or under any fixed structure of place and time that has begun to feel like mere constraint, and anyone wanting an entry into Ruusbroec that does not require committing to his longest book. Readers looking for warm devotional consolation without ascetic demand, or for systematic theological argument, should look elsewhere.